Unfortunately, I am in a field where I need to include a tertiary y axis on occasion for data documentation. I read in a previous comment somewhere that it is not impossible. I’m fine with the secondary axis addition and scaling and everything, but can’t figure out how to include a third y axis on one x axis.

Thanks so much!

I wrote about that problem here:

http://peltiertech.com/Excel/Charts/ColumnsOnTwoAxes.html

Keep in mind that charts with two axes are confusing to read, particularly when you’re trying to figure out which bars go to which axis.

I’m facing a problem that I haven’t seen addressed anywhere.

I have two series of data with clustered column chart. When I add the secondary axis, the columns that where side by side became aligned with the higher valueshiding the lower ones.

Could you help?

Thanks,

Hesley

You bring up a very good point. Having worked for many years as an engineer in the US, I’ve had to do my share of work in mixed units. Pounds and kilograms, meters and feet, Fahrenheit and Celsius, you name it. However, this is a different situation than Stephen laid out in his essay. He was critical of multiple series plotted on axes with unrelated setss of units ($ sales vs. units sold, for example). You are normalizing your data to cost per energy content, so you have a single value scale, with multiple ways to represent that scale depending on the type of fuel.

That is like a chart that shows daily temperatures, with Celsius on one axxiss and Fahrenheit on the other. The reader can look at the data points, and look left or right to determine the temperature in whatever units are most suitable. In fact, while waiting for this page to load so I could approve your comment (stupid hosting company), I set up some charts illustrating just this issue, and showing how to set up a “nice” converted axis. Stay tuned, it may be up by tomorrow at this time, if I don’t fall asleep waiting for the server.

Server update: They have finally admitted that this new “platform” they’ve migrated me onto is woefully underequipped to handle lots of MySQL requests. By the weekend they plan to have five additional MySQL servers on line, and things should again be hunky dory. I can’t believe their prediction of server requirements was so far off. I worked on a project a couple years ago where we predicted just this kind of server loading (I had to lern queuing theory and all that), and we got to where our predictions were within a factor of 2. Well, in fairness, I guess my hosting company was within a factor of ZERO.